 Abe-san (right) is ready to go. I predicted he would win since he made the noodles himself. |
 The 15 contestants are in place on an elevated rostrum for all to see. It turned out that the winners are all in this photo as well as last place finisher. Red sweatshirt - 1st, blue shirt - 2nd, grey sweatshirt - 3rd, red hat - last |
 The contest has begun. Steve & Tsukiko are giving it their best effort. |
 What's Steve doing? Chewing his noodles? He'll never win that way. The Japanese contestants just slide then down their throat unchewed. |
 These guys are really going strong. The boy on the right was really impressive! He ate all his noodles and finished a close 4th place. |
 Kimura-san is givig it his best |
 After the winners were declared we could finish the rest of our noodles at our liesure. Abe-san is doing this now. |
 Naomi came to help Kimura-san since he couldn't finish all of his noodles. |
 Yoshiko helped Steve to finish his. |
 Look at how many noodles are left! Even Yoshiko couldn't finish Steve's leftovers. |
Anyway, we all enjoyed the event and it was a free lunch for us all. I'm convinced we farmhouse folk were at a distinct disadvantage in the competition since we had stuffed ourselves on Abe-san's soba noodles just the night before. I suspect the winners began the competition with empty stomachs. Never-the-less, it was quite impressive to see just how fast they could consume all those noodles and the fact that they could consume the entire amount. Especially the boy that finished fourth. I estimate I ate less that 1/4 of my noodles.
After the festival Kimura-san took us
to visit some of the temples on the nearby mountain area,
Haguro-san-
You can step through the pages of this
site using the table below.
The table is arranged (left to right) in a chronological
sequence.